A little bit of my own love – Kommersant

The Russian premiere of the vocal cycle “A Poet’s Love” by Alexei Sysoev, one of the brightest contemporary Russian composers, took place in the GES-2 Assembly Hall. Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth, arranged for chamber ensemble by Arnold Schoenberg, became an ideal match for the composition. The Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music (MASM) was conducted by Fyodor Lednev. I tried to understand the meanings and subtexts of the program Ilya Ovchinnikov.

For 51-year-old Alexei Sysoev, until recently considered a “young composer”, this season is especially successful. Several times a month, his compositions have been performed before, but since September, Sysoev has had world premieres at GES-2, the Ural Opera Ballet, the Tchaikovsky Hall and the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory. Now another Russian one has been added to them, and one can only be glad for the author, whose music is in demand. The presence of the name of Schoenberg on the poster, even as the author of the arrangement, in such a situation causes mixed feelings: his legacy is almost not mastered by our listeners or concert venues. And if someone decides to conduct the All Schoenberg cycle, by analogy with the All Stravinsky Philharmonic subscription, the result could be a box office failure – although in many respects these figures are of equal scale, and there would be no late Stravinsky as such without Schoenberg and his school, as if there were no Sysoev.

Nevertheless, the demand for Sysoev today is clearly greater – the broken, screaming, painful music of Sysoev is more in tune with the modern listener; Schoenberg’s work, about which a hundred years ago they spoke in similar words, is felt by the public as something too academic and therefore irrelevant, although not really assimilated. It would be interesting to compare Sysoev in one program with the “pure” Schoenberg – not necessarily with the more radical later, it could also be with the almost romantic early. But even in the arrangement of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” Schoenberg was quite audible; his version was made in 1921 for the Society of Closed Musical Performances, where large compositions were played by a chamber ensemble. “Song of the Earth” was written for tenor, contralto (there is also a variant for tenor and baritone, which was performed now) and an orchestra, which in Mahler’s original source is relatively large in composition, but at the same time sounds as chamber as possible – so much so that Schoenberg’s version, hardly performed in Russia before, seems congenial. Having reduced the composition several times, Schoenberg left the spirit of music untouched and even more concentrated – only sometimes with surprise you hear a piano instead of brass.

This spirit, under the direction of Fyodor Lednev, was ideally recreated by tenor Boris Rudak and baritone Konstantin Suchkov; MASM soloists were also on top, especially the woodwinds, on which so much depends in the finale. “The Farewell,” the culmination of “Song of the Earth,” is as long as the previous installments put together and seems peaceful only at first glance. The oboe solo, his duet with the clarinet, the ominous creak of the bassoon seem to take all the strength from the listener – such is the power of one of Mahler’s later compositions, probably the last romantic, enhanced by Schoenberg.

Unlike Schoenberg, Robert Schumann, whose “Love of a Poet” to Heine’s verses, remains one of the manifestos of musical romanticism, has been fully mastered by our stage and public. Woe to the listener who would try to hear direct references to Schumann in Sysoev’s cycle of the same name, although they certainly exist and are hidden as carefully as possible. Shortly before the concert, the composer increased the intrigue by posting a commentary on “The Poet’s Love” on one of the social networks and specifying that the work for him is “a bit of his own Fourteenth Symphony.” We are talking about the analogy with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, which amazes listeners from the moment of its premiere (1969) to this day as a hopeless work even by Shostakovich’s standards. This feeling is enhanced by the unusual orchestration for strings and percussion, not to mention the texts that are entirely devoted to death, including the death of the poet.

The theme of departure, the participation of two singers, a place among other symphonies, love for Mahler – all this makes Symphony No. 14 for Shostakovich “a little bit of his “Song of the Earth””, linking two masterpieces. Sysoev prolongs this connection for his part, although he starts from a different point: he turns to the same texts of Heine as Schumann, trying to follow him along the same path. The texts resist – of those that are heard by Schumann, Sysoev did not use all and not entirely – but the meanings also resist: according to the composer, “the impulse was replaced by depression, delight – a painful frenzy and even hysteria, heartfelt recognition – a serious threat.” The composition was created by order of the Schumann Festival in Düsseldorf, where it was performed in 2014 by the same MASM and Fyodor Lednev, as well as Natalia Pshenichnikova; as the author says, the work went “surprisingly easily, in one breath and like for the first time.”

The more the composer, according to his confession, was struck by the premiere of the cycle, which revealed such properties as “a breakdown, deep pain, muddy fear, depressive groans” and much more: love songs turned into songs about death. Now, in GES-2, an ensemble of fifteen soloists and soprano Olga Rossini sounded at the limit of expressive possibilities; all the more eerie among the creaking and crackling were quiet episodes when the accordion pulled a note for a long time or the cello sobbed a mournful solo, so that the brass deafened the listener even more. Closer to the finale, when the low notes of the double bass and bass clarinet set the foundation for an amazing, unearthly chord, the music took on a completely new dimension – and, alas, it ended there. The decision to combine The Poet’s Love and the chamber version of the Song of the Earth is impeccable: from the finale of the latter, which seemed to Mahler suicidally gloomy, in the current context comes not so much death as enlightenment.